Facebook appears to be recovering from a more than 14-hour disruption to all of its products that left them mostly inaccessible across the world. On Wednesday, people around the world found out when all three services experienced interruptions throughout the day.

The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected. Reported first on Wednesday, Facebook and Instagram are still down for some users across the world. Also, it looks like people are facing difficulty using WhatsApp in some parts of the world.

The issue also affected Facebook Workplace, the service used by businesses to communicate internally.

The
last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when
the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users
today.

The problems began yesterday afternoon, and only showed
real signs of recovery this morning. They meant core platforms many
people rely on every day to communicate were rendered mostly useless.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” Facebook said in a statement.

In response to rumours posted on other social networks, the company said the outages were not a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS – a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic.

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced a push to bring all of his apps closer together, uniting direct messages across different services. The service interruptions highlighted the potential risks of a consolidated social media giant, as users flitted from one lonely social feed to the next, searching fruitlessly for updates.

James Barnley

I’m the editor of the DomainingAfrica. I write about internet and social media, focusing mainly on Domains. As a subscriber to my newsletter, you’ll get a lot of information on Domain Issues, ICANN, new gtld’s, Mobile technology and social media.